Inside the fortress, there was a fatal weakness, and that was the traitors inside. Their presence, like an invisible sword, could pierce the defenses at any moment and make all efforts come to naught.
On the eve of the Battle of White Horse Mountain, the defection of Gu Zhongjiao, a company-level officer of the 38th Army of the Volunteer Army, showed us this. He leaked the top-secret plan of our army to raid the position of Baima Mountain, giving the enemy time to strengthen the position, which led to the failure of this military operation.
This painful lesson makes us understand the horror of internal traitors, and it also makes us more vigilant and protect our secrets.
In the Battle of Baima Mountain, a South Korean officer defected to the 15th Army of the Volunteer Army before the Battle of Shangganling began, revealing the enemy's information that he wanted to attack Shangganling. However, his superiors defended him, arguing that he was not to blame.
The reason is that on the night of October 5, 1952, the sentry heard the footsteps of "rustling" on the position, and when he approached, he found that the other party was holding up his hands, and the person who came turned out to be Lee Jiqiu, the combat staff officer of the 2nd Battalion of the 32nd Regiment of the **2nd Division of Korea, who surrendered and revealed an important information.
However, this information did not attract the attention of the commander of the 15th Army, and it was considered that the commander Qin Jiwei missed the opportunity. So, what kind of information did Li Jiqiu reveal, and why didn't he pay attention to it?
Let's go back to that war-torn battlefield to find out.
The U.S. artillery positions have led to a high degree of concern on both sides about the secrecy of the battle plan, making it difficult to see the other side's operational deployment. However, our army can only explore the reality of the opponent through small-scale battles, and then formulate the next battle plan.
Beginning on 18 September, General Deng Hua, acting commander of the Chinese People's Volunteers, personally commanded eight field armies on the front line of the Chinese People's Volunteers, and on a front line more than 180 kilometers wide, they sent small units to carry out many tactical and exploratory counterattacks against several targets of the enemy in front of them.
At the same time, the U.S. military is also selecting valuable locations as targets for the next strike. It is worth mentioning that in early September, Van Vliet, commander of the US Eighth Army, surrounded by his subordinates, wore military uniforms and climbed Jixiong Mountain opposite Wusheng Mountain.
Van Vliet was an experienced military man who graduated from West Point and is known as a living fossil of the U.S. Army. He moved from the European theater to the Korean theater in 1951.
Van Vliet's tactical style was completely different from Ridgway's "magnetic tactics" that focused on close combat, and he advocated giving full play to the superiority of the US military's firepower to fight long-range battles and achieve results through indiscriminate bombardment.
It is known that the "Van Vliet ammunition volume" brought huge losses to our army.
Van Vliet used a telescope to observe the two small plateaus in front of the Five Sacred Mountains for a full 5 minutes, and he pointed to 9579 and 5377 Heights, said to Major General Jenkins of the U.S. Ninth Army: "These two heights are like bones stuck in the throat. ”
Jenkins asked tentatively, "The general means to pull it out?" Van Vleek nodded and said, "Exactly!" The old fox made such a decision not on a whim, but on a deliberate basis.
As early as July and August of the same year, Van Vliet visited this place twice, and urged the 7th Division of the US 9th Army stationed here to capture prisoners and reconnoitre, find out the deployment of the volunteers, and formulate an operational plan for attacking the above-mentioned heights.
In early August, the commander of the US division even sneaked into 5979 Heights, for a close-up view. In early September, the "showdown operation" plan of the 31st Regiment of the 7th US Division was reported to the headquarters of the US 7th Division.
Major General Division Commander Smith studied and made the revisions, which were then reported to Lieutenant General Jenkins of the 9th Army. According to this battle plan, it was a one-man show by the US military, and nothing happened to the ROK army.
After review, Jenkins proposed that the South Korean 2nd Division be involved in the "Operation Showdown" operation. At the heart of the "Operation Showdown" plan was an assault on the two heights garrisoned by the Volunteer Army in early October, with the U.S. Army responsible for attacking 5979 heights, the South Korean Army was responsible for the attack 5377 Highlands North Mountain.
Later, the battle plan was handed over to Van Vliet, commander of the Eighth Army. Van Vliet finally approved the battle plan, and it was approved by Commander Clarke.
After the plan was finalized, the ROK army began to be notified of its combat readiness. In the blink of an eye, October came, and the US and South Korean forces were ready for everything, and a surprise attack was about to start.
At this time, there was a traitor in the Korean army, and Li Jiqiu, a staff officer of the 2nd Battalion of the 32nd Regiment of the 2nd Korean Division, came to the position of the Volunteer Army with a battle plan. At the military headquarters of the 15th Army, Commander Qin Jiwei stared at the battle plan and fell into deep thought.
In the plan, the US 7th Division and the South Korean 2nd Division each sent one battalion to the 597th Division of the 15th Army of the Volunteer Army under the cover of 16 artillery battalions with 280 artillery pieces and 200 sorties of fighter-bombers9 Highlands and 5377 Heights launched a raid.
The commanders and fighters of the 15th Army were also taken aback when they saw it, and they all said that this trick of the enemy was really poisonous.
Surprisingly, Qin Jiwei only smiled slightly in the end, and said to Li Jiqiu: "Your deception performance is good, but you still need to work harder." As he spoke, Qin Jiwei put aside the battle plan.
As a result, as expected, the enemy launched an offensive on the Shangganling Heights on October 14, and the Battle of Shangganling officially began. At the beginning of the campaign, the 15th Army did not concentrate all its forces on two heights, and also planned to participate in a tactical counterattack in the fall of 1952.
It was not until the "joint **" launched an offensive that the 15th Army immediately changed its operational plan and threw all its forces into the defensive operation in the Shangganling area. Some people believe that if Qin Jiwei attaches importance to the intelligence of Li Jiqiu, a captain of the ROK army, it will be of great help to the preparations for the campaign.
After the war, Qin Jiwei reflected on his mistakes in combat preparations, saying: "We did have some omissions, we did not expect that the enemy would attack the heights of Wusheng Mountain with so many troops, and we were not ready to fight a protracted war. ”
However, the reason why Qin Jiwei did not pay attention to the enemy's information was because he believed that it was impossible for a battalion-level staff officer to grasp such a secret battle plan, and he suspected that the other party was deceiving the enemy, while Van Vliet was attacking the west.
Qin Jiwei believed that the focus of the enemy's attack should be on the Western Mountain, but it turned out that his ** was wrong. "Therefore, we were a bit passive at the beginning, the second echelon was relatively hastily invested, and the artillery support on the first day was not in place," he explained.
If we had reached the direction of the enemy's attack at the beginning, then the enemy would not have been able to attack on the first day, and our estimate of the enemy's sustained attack power was too conservative, so there was a misunderstanding in command. ”
Wang Jinshan said at the post-war summary meeting of the 15th Army that Qin Jiwei, the acting commander of the Third Corps, was not incompetent, but because Van Vliet had taken strict secrecy measures, we could not accurately predict his actions.
In his document to Clark, Van Vliet only said that the October operation was in place, and did not disclose a specific date when he communicated it to his subordinates. In addition, he also swaggered into a daze, which gave the commanders and fighters of our army a false impression.
The Battle of Shangganling and the Battle of Baima Mountain are different and cannot be compared. In the Battle of White Horse Mountain, the South Korean army had only one defensive focus, and after receiving the information, it only needed to strengthen its vigilance and increase its troops.
Therefore, we should pay more attention to intelligence collection and analysis to improve our ability to deal with complex war situations.
The 15th Army faced a dilemma in the Korean War. On the one hand, their defense needed to cover both the Western Mountains and the Five Sacred Mountains, but due to the limited number of troops, they could not do both.
On the other hand, the U.S. military has strong mobility capabilities, and if the defense is focused on Wusheng Mountain, it may be turned by the U.S. military to attack the Western Mountain. Therefore, the army commander Qin Jiwei chose to focus his defense on the western mountains, because the flat and open terrain of the Pingkang River valley there is conducive to the surprise attack of the US mechanized troops, and once lost, the volunteer army will face the risk of strategic retreat.
On the contrary, the mountain road in Shangganling is rugged, and even if the American army mainly attacks there, it will not be able to deploy its troops, and our army will have time to reinforce it. At the same time, since air supremacy is in the hands of the US military, large-scale movements of our troops will be discovered in time, so the risk of transferring troops to Shangganling is too great.
You're all hindsight. In that case, I would have chosen to stick to Western Mountain. Because Li Jiqiu is a defector after all, not the ** of our army.
Therefore, Qin Jiwei's last choice was wise.